5 Bands to Watch in 2014, from CMJ

There's a lot written about the bands you should pay attention to now, but at this year's just-ended CMJ music festival in New York City, a sprawling selection of up-and-comers, we decided to look at where a few promising hopefuls might just land in 2014. Here, your predictive guide.

Ryan Hemsworth

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What it is: A Canadian beat-maker who's spent years crafting a sound that combines hip-hop's head-nodding rhythms with dance music's hypnotic melodies and plunges the whole thing in a pool of ambient reverb and washed-out synthesizers that you can blissfully float on all day. This year he released two records, the EP Still Awake and the brand-new LP Guilt Trips (out this week), that offer more pop punch and could make 2014 a big year for the young producer.

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Where he'll be in a year: Behind the boards for a name-brand rapper.

Kelela

What it is: A highly buzzed-about vocalist whose new mixtape, Cut 4 Me, is a crafty mix of the deep, dark, minimalist electronic sounds that have been thrown together in the rather unhelpfully named genre "bass music" (which you can hear all over the place on the latest Drake and Kanye records) with a pop sensibility that should appeal to anyone with a soft spot for turn-of-the-millennium radio R&B. Right now there are a lot of artists (including a lot of A-list names) trying to figure out a sound that Kelela's already well on her way to owning.

Where she'll be in a year: Somewhere near the top of the Hot 100.

Jensen Sportag

What it is: A pair of producers who are just nailing the chilled-out hybrid of pop and dance music that's become a majorly big deal in the wake of Disclosure's zeitgeist-defining album Settle. It's energetic enough to spend all night dancing to, but mellow enough to work as your recovery soundtrack the next day.

Where they'll be in a year: Being played in the lobbies of pretty much every boutique hotel on the globe.

Calvin Love

What it is: A Northampton quartet playing the kind of eccentric noise-pop originally championed by bands like Helium, Polvo, and the Breeders back in the '90s, which combines substantial amounts of fuzzed-out guitar with slanted melodies that refuse to go where you expect them to but end up in catchy places nonetheless.

Where they'll be in a year: Still playing music festivals for indie-rock geeks, just further up the bill.